Chris Abouzeid's Blog, page 13

Mining Day Jobs: Writers at Work

By Randy Susan Meyers It’s common for writers to claim day jobs stand between us and a published novel. I understand. For years I thought if only and when and someday. And yes, working one, two, three jobs at a time took a big bite out of what would certainly ...

Globe Lit 2.0 — Interview with K. Anis Ahmed

                      By Javed Jahangir World literature, once the province of interdisciplinary graduate programs with first-world-guilt induced motives, is making way for a hipper, crisper Globe Lit 2.0. The lingua franca is an internationalized English, at home in the Favelas of ...

Judging a Book by its Cover

By Juliette Fay If you know nothing about a book or its author, how else can you judge it? When I’m perusing bookstore shelves, it’s often the split-second appeal of the jacket that makes me pick it up or pass it by. It’s sort of like an impulse buy—an impulse ...

Telling The Tough Story

By E. B. Moore ‘You’re taking advantage of other people’s misery.” This accusation was leveled at a painter friend of mine whose latest show depicted the aftermath of terrorism. The paintings were full of ruin sewn with glimpses of personal detail, beautiful and terrible at the same time. They drew ...

The Rejection Chronicles: Summer Conference Edition

  By Robin Black   Now that I have some publications to my name, I’ve developed this strong, maybe strange, impulse to make a cautionary tale of myself. I’ve made so many mistakes along the way, and for whatever reasons I feel better about those mistakes if I believe they ...

Pen, Paper, Hand

                  By Kathy Crowley I started doing all my writing on my computer a long time ago, at least 10 years, maybe longer. The advantages are obvious: once drafted on the keyboard, your words are available for all kinds of “processing” — ...

Paddling Blind

  By Nichole Bernier Last week the yoga class I take from time to time decided to meet on the water. “We’ll visit the swans,” said the instructor Erin as she directed three of us into kayaks. Then she climbed into her own — well, they were all her own, ...

Ask Dr. Digital

Edited by Chris Abouzeid Dear Dr. Digital: I hear about hacks all the time: “computer hacks,” “life hacks,” “writing hacks.” But what exactly are they? And why do I need them? Hackeysacked   Dear Hackeysacked, The terms hack and hacker are derived from the Old English words ha (meaning “in ...

ASK MARGIE: Wanna Quit Your Day Job? Economic Realities 101

  Dear Margie, I recently left a dreadful job, and being at home has given me the opportunity to freelance and of course work on my writing. My partner is okay with temporarily supporting me, but he’s expecting me to get kinda-substantial income from writing in the foreseeable future, which ...

The Agony and the Ecstasy: Writing for Occasions

By Kim Triedman Two weeks ago, in the weddings section of the Sunday Times, I was listed as a minister of the Universal Life Church. While this is technically true (I’d had the NYT fact-checking call to confirm it), my association with the ministry is strictly mail-order: I sent them ...